Helping schools stay ahead of the curve
Last August, Oxford University Press surveyed 2,000 UK students aged 13-18. It found that only 47 % of young people felt confident recognising whether AI‑generated information was accurate – meaning that more than half could not tell if content from AI was true.
Furthermore, nearly half (48 %) explicitly wanted more support from teachers to understand what content is trustworthy, and 51 % asked for clearer guidance on using AI tools in learning.
This confirmed what we already knew: media and AI literacy – along with financial literacy – are essential for a future-proofed UK schools curriculum.
The 2025 government curriculum review concurred – and not just across RSHE, Computing, and Citizenship, but also within English, Science, and History. This, however, highlighted a further problem: namely the lack of sufficient training and support for educators in these subject areas.
Creating a training shortfall
In December 2025, Parent Zone co-signed a statement with our partners at the Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA), highlighting that curriculum reforms will fail unless high-quality, funded support for educators follows.
Only 1 % of educators feel prepared to teach citizenship and media literacy content, according to a 2025 report. In other words: there is much work to be done in the two and a half years before the revised curriculum comes into practice.
The issue isn’t just funding. Teachers also require the time and bandwidth for training. Through our programmes, we speak to many teachers – and budget and bandwidth are two things they are rarely blessed with. This is especially challenging given that many feel the current curriculum is already overloaded and hard to implement.
Delivering training where teachers are
This is why we’re working with partners like YouTube, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google DeepMind to deliver free, high-quality AI and media literacy training into schools.
We understand that resource-stretched schools and time-poor teachers have limited scope for training and CPD – meaning that when it does happen, it must be practical and high quality.
Through trial – and sometimes error – we have adapted our free training model to offer a blend of in-school training options that meet multiple needs:
- On-site workshops for large groups, ideal for INSET days and staff upskilling across MATs and school networks.
- Regionalised individual offsite training with travel and expenses covered.
- Interactive twilight virtual sessions that fit into the small windows of time often available.
View our range of training opportunities on our programmes page
It’s a start – and by no means a complete solution. If you are an educator, school, or MAT looking for AI and media literacy support in 2026 and beyond, please get in touch: info@parentzone.org.uk